A grim subject we often touch on is how surreal it feels when our favorite celebrities die. After all, they remain perfectly young and healthy whenever we revisit them in reruns of various shows and films. And it can be heartbreaking to look at the vibrant person on our TV screen and realize they’ll never act in anything ever again.
Lately, we’ve been thinking about this and how it relates to our most beloved ‘70s sitcoms. These were men and women who helped pioneer television as we know it. In short, they made TV history, and it’s worth remembering how they died and, more importantly, how they lived.
Who are the 70s sitcom stars whose deaths we’ve never gotten over? Keep reading to find out!
John Ritter
John Ritter is, of course, someone whose career wasn’t limited to 70s sitcoms. But well before he could headline later shows like 8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter, he was impressing all of us as a star on the classic show Three’s Company. He ultimately won an Emmy for his performance in a show with a very scandalous premise (at least, for the 70s): that his character was pretending to be gay so he could rent an apartment with two women who often dressed in very skimpy clothing.
Ritter began experiencing some health difficulties in 2003, and he left the set of 8 Simple Rules to go to the ER. It looked like he might have had a heart attack, but doctors then realized he had an internal tear known as an aortic dissection. Sadly, this revelation came too late, and the acclaimed actor ended up dying on the operating table at the age of only 54.
Erin Moran
After she dazzled everyone on Happy Days, most audiences assumed Erin Moran wouldn’t have any trouble finding work. Sadly, they were wrong: after that show ended, she could only really find bit roles here and there…nothing that approached the steady work she once enjoyed. This led to financial issues that reached their head when she and her husband Steve Fleischman were evicted and eventually started living from motel to motel.
Moran herself eventually got diagnosed with squamous cell carcinoma, a particularly aggressive kind of cancer. Less than a year later, her dead body was discovered by paramedics answering an emergency call. The former Happy Days star was 56 at the time of death.
Robin Williams
Younger audiences may be a tad puzzled to see Robin Williams on a list of ‘70s sitcom stars. After all, he went on to be a very prolific film actor, someone who appeared in hit movies like Good Will Hunting and even loaned his voice to the powerhouse Disney movie Aladdin. Before all that, though, he starred in the insanely popular Happy Days spinoff Mork and Mindy, where he played a zany alien trying to learn the ways of humanity in the funniest possible way.
There was nothing funny about the beloved actor’s death, though. His body was found in his San Francisco home in August 2014, where he had apparently died of suicide. The actor had been struggling with major depression ever since getting diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease three months earlier. Such a diagnosis would have been depressing in and of itself, but in a strange wrinkle, it turns out that Mrs. Doubtfire star was misdiagnosed.
An autopsy of his body revealed that he was actually suffering from a Parkinson’s-like condition known as Lewy Body Disease. By any other name, though, the actor had a disease that threatened to significantly reduce his quality of life, and he took his life at the age of 63.
Dana Plato
All of the celebrities on this list have sad stories…after all, most of these stars were taken from us well before their time. However, perhaps no celebrity has a sadder story than Dana Plato, who was a star on the hit ‘70s sitcom Diff’rent Strokes. The show’s success made her one of the world’s most popular child actors, but it didn’t take long before the pressure of making this beloved sitcom began to get to her.
Shortly after the show began, a 14-year-old Plato overdosed on prescription painkillers. One year later, she showed up to the set intoxicated. When she was 18, the star became pregnant, resulting in the producers of Diff’rent Strokes to downsize her to a recurring role. Seven years later, she landed in legal trouble after getting arrested for robbing a video store and trying to use fake prescriptions to get drugs.
By 1999, Dana Plato was telling the world about how she was clean and how she was sick of defending her reputation. Sadly, she was lying about being clean: when she and her fiancé visited his parent’s home in Moore, Oklahoma, she went to her bedroom to ostensibly take a nap. She was later found dead of a drug overdose which was later ruled a suicide. The former child star died at 34.